The Eleventh Hour
by Victoria M
Summary: Last minute rescues are Illya's stock in trade, but this time Napoleon has reason to believe he may not show up in time.


The Eleventh Hour

by Victoria Martin

Summary: You've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk it by yourself

Warnings: None. All my fics have happy endings!

1.

Napoleon has never given any thought to what it would be like to die, which is rather unusual for a man in his profession. Illya would say - often has, in fact - that there is nothing to be ashamed of in facing the fact of death. It comes for all of us in the end, so isn't it better to be prepared? But Napoleon disagrees. Napoleon has always fared well by refusing to believe that death will ever come for _him_. He's famous for this attitude throughout UNCLE. Solo's luck, they call it, all those skin-of-my-teeth, tightrope-over-the-abyss, hair's-breadth escapes; and they shake their heads admiringly, because who else has got the balls to walk right up to the Grim Reaper and laugh in his face, in a display of such jaw-dropping cheek that even death is too stunned to react? If Napoleon ever thought about it, he might suspect it's his conviction that he's untouchable that deprives death of its power. If he ever started believing it could happen to him, perhaps the spell would be broken. But he doesn't ever think about it.

Illya's different. Reading between the lines of a certain report, Napoleon suspects - because it's not as if Illya would ever _tell_ him - that he was once brainwashed by Thrush into believing he was dying the worst death he could imagine. Napoleon has also seen him curled into a whimpering ball of fear, crying like a baby in the face of some mortal terror that only he could see. And yet both times he walked into HQ the next day, head held as high as ever, not embarrassed at all. "It was just the gas, Napoleon," he said, when Napoleon attempted to tactfully raise the subject, and "It was an induced response. Don't take it personally."

It's something Napoleon secretly admires about Illya, the way he can separate who he is from what people think of him. Admires and also, even more secretly, despises. Just a tiny bit. Because there is no way he would ever allow himself to knuckle under the way Illya does. When it comes down to it, Napoleon believes that _he_ could have resisted the gas; that however terrified he was, he would never have let himself weep publicly in that humiliating fashion. The only time he's ever crawled, ever begged, was in Berlin, when he pretended to confess to being a traitor; and that was only because he knew he could have taken all Strothers threw at him, and more. He thinks he did a good job of appearing to break down, though it didn't fool Illya, not even for a second. Illya doesn't think much of Napoleon's acting skills. He says no matter who he's pretending to be, his real self always shows through. Actually, that's not quite what he says. He says "With an ego that size, it's no wonder you can't hide it," and he says "That's a caricature; you always send the message 'This isn't really me'," and he says "Not being Napoleon Solo isn't the end of the world, you know."

Napoleon disagrees.

He disagrees with Illya about acting and he disagrees about death. And he's damned if he's going to change his mind now, just because by his reckoning he's got less than five minutes to live. Though he has to concede it would be easier to carry on not thinking about it if everything didn't hurt so damn much.

2.

Halfway through the evening I was so bored I was seriously tempted to just fall off my bar stool and die. Though, you know, all parties feel a little like that these days. The mix is always the same - movie starlets and wannabes, minor European royalty, ambassadors from nowhere anyone's ever heard of, one-hit wonders, and sundry sycophants and hangers-on. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. At least the champagne was pretty good. I guess I was kind of drunk, though not as drunk as I wanted to be, since it would have taken at least three more bottles to make any of the guys in the room look remotely attractive. The last attempt at a chat-up line had come from the lead singer of a band that aspired to be "bigger than Herman and the Hermits," although, if he was a representative sample, they still had a lot of growing to do. The guy before that was the Deputy Ambassador of Somewhere-istan, and the one before that an actor whose big break had been a starring role as Robert Redford's body double. That was the only reason I was still hanging on in there - not because of the body double, but because Redford was supposed to be showing up later. I had some business with him, not that he knew it yet.

So there I was, killing time, waiting for Robert and wondering if a line of coke wouldn't do more for me than the bubbly, when this guy came up and said "Can I get you something with a little more kick?" He didn't look out of place, exactly, though I definitely had him pegged as the ambassadorial rather than the rock star type - one of those sleek, tuxedo'd fellows, with a rather slimy charm, a weakness for blondes, and a wife at home who doesn't understand him. I'd opted for blonde that day, so I guess I had it coming.

He bought another bottle of champagne, seeing as I'd declined his offer of a little more kick, and fed me a few faintly sleazy lines that weren't quite _double entendres_, but close enough for government work, and I was just thinking it was time to give him the brush off, when Mr Herman and the Hermits turned up again. I'd seen him glance over at me from time to time, with an expression of sullen disapproval on his face, but I guess I hadn't realized quite how much passion was churning away beneath that chilly exterior. At any rate, he walked right up to Slimey Guy and said "Why don't you leave her alone? Can't you see what she wants is a real man?" I've got to admit, I snorted slightly into my drink at the thought of Herman as The Man Who Knows What Women Want, but luckily Slimey Guy didn't notice the champagne coming out of my nose, because he was too busy saying in tones of almost comical disbelief "I'm sorry?"

"You heard me," persisted Herman, "She wants a real man." Then he turned to me and said "Would you care to dance, miss?"

This was shaping up to be the most entertaining thing to happen all evening, so I said as breathlessly as possible (quite a trick on account of the aforementioned champagne in the nasal passages) "Oh, yes!" Slimey goggled slightly, but he didn't try to stop us, so I sauntered onto the dance floor with Herman and started strutting my stuff, making sure I cast the occasional glance Slime-wards. Sure enough, after a couple of minutes he came over and cut in.

"I'm taking over now, pal," he said, putting one arm around my waist.

That was when Herman punched him in the jaw.

It came right out of the blue, and it certainly livened things up. Slimey hardly seemed to feel it, which was my first hint that there was more to him than met the eye.

"You, my friend, have just made a very serious mistake," he said, fingering his jawbone. There was something about the way he said it that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. He spoke very quietly, like a man who doesn't have to make threats, but there was a chill to his tone that would have had me backing slowly out the door if I'd been a guy.

"Prove it!" sneered Herman, demonstrating, as if proof were necessary, that men have the survival instincts of a snowman in a desert. So Slimey Guy straightened his tie, tugged down his cuffs, and then, not to put too fine a point on it, whipped his ass.

3.

There's always a chance Illya will show up, of course. Pull off an eleventh hour rescue. Or, in this case, an eleventh hour and fifty sixth minute rescue. It's not completely unprecedented. There have been times when Illya's turned up trumps. Not as often as when Napoleon's come through for him, but times nonetheless. Occasions. Red letter days. Of course, Illya might not be in the mood for heroics right now, at least not where Napoleon's concerned. Napoleon hates to admit it, especially under the current circumstances, but he hasn't been all that nice to Illya of late. In fact, the knuckles of his right hand are still stinging where they came into contact with Illya's teeth. It's crazy, really - you'd think that with his entire body in the iron grip of pain, he wouldn't notice a little scrape like that, and yet it feels like the straw that's going to break the camel's back. As if he could cope, he really could, if it weren't for that godawful burning feeling on the back of his fingers. He thinks he might have knocked one of Illya's front teeth out, there was certainly enough blood, which probably ought to make him feel guilty. Except who did the little idiot think he was, giving him tips on his seduction technique? Okay, so he'd been right about the de la Salle girl, she certainly had been responsive to a "real man", but it wasn't as if he needed _Illya's_ help in getting a response out of girls. Not even bored, jaded girls like Sasha de la Salle, who needed the thrill of violence to kick-start their nervous system.

Just thinking about Illya's attitude of know-it-all superiority, Napoleon can feel the anger start to pump through his veins. Anger is good. Anger gives him the strength to fight against the curious stubbornness of his own body, that doesn't see the point in shifting its position, not even to get a better look at the door, not even to see if Illya is coming. But the anger does it, the anger gets him moving, shifts him a good five inches, even if quite a lot of it just pumps straight out again. But look on the bright side. The good thing about lying in your own blood is, it warms up the floor. Because otherwise he would be _really_ cold. He's shivering so much already he thinks he must have bruises where his elbows and shoulder blades are knocking against the ground. Illya had better hurry up, damn him.

Of course, Illya might not feel inclined to hurry up, not after the way Napoleon laid into him. And when he had been pulling his own punches, too. No, under the circumstances it might take Illya a while to wonder where his friend has gotten too, and even longer to decide he cares enough to look for him. And he'll have to have made up his mind that he does care and have started to look quite a while ago, because judging by the lightness in his head and the amount of blood pooling on the cellar floor, Napoleon figures Illya has about three minutes left to put in an appearance, if he isn't to find that he's staged a last minute rescue for a corpse.

4.

The fight was really rather thrilling. The two of them went at it hammer and tongs, flying over tables and crashing into the band and the other dancers. There was glass everywhere, and girls screaming, and one guy who tried to pull them apart got a bottle broken over his head and threw up into the ornamental fountain. I was just starting to wonder if I was going to have to call security, in spite of my policy of keeping those fellows off-stage, when Slimey Guy got Herman into a headlock and it was all over.

The crowd breathed a sigh of relief and started to look for their drinks again. Slimey hissed something into Herman's ear, and Herman said "All right, all right, you win," and staggered off with as much dignity as he could muster in the direction of the conveniences, presumably to splash the blood off his face, and Slimey Guy held out his hand to me and said "May I have this dance?" There was a strange light in his eyes, a kind of manic mischievousness, and he somehow managed to look completely unruffled, in spite of the spots of blood on his dress shirt and pieces of glass in his hair. In fact, he looked totally irresistible, and I didn't even try.

The band struck up something nice and slow, in the hopes of calming everyone down, while the catering staff started discreetly cleaning up the mess. Mr Not-So-Slimey-After-All put his arms around me, and I pressed myself against his shoulder and shut my eyes. He was a good dancer, strong and confident, and when I slid my hands over his back I could feel the muscles moving underneath his tux. The muscles and something else, something that set my nerves twanging like a plucked guitar string. I've got to admit, when a man like that carries a gun, it's the icing on the cake.

"Shall we go somewhere more private?" he whispered into my ear, just as I was starting to think that dancing didn't let me go nearly far enough. I nodded. After all, Redford wasn't going to show up for a while, so there was no reason why pleasure shouldn't come before business for once.

Unfortunately, it wasn't an attitude my new-found friend seemed to share. Oh, he accompanied me downstairs all right, and spent a good few minutes licensing his roving hands to the point where he missed finding my knife by a hair's breadth, but then, when we came up for air from one of the deepest kisses I've had in a long time, he said "I'm told you're the girl who can help me get my hands on this new wonder drug?"

"What wonder drug?" I said cautiously.

"Oh, come on, everyone in Hollywood's talking about it," he murmured, sliding his hand up the inside of my thigh. "Twice the high of cocaine and five times as addictive. Gives you quite a hold over people." I slapped the hand away at the last second.

"What makes you think I know anything about it?"

"A little bird told me." He gave me a conspiratorial smile and started nibbling my ear. I relaxed slightly; maybe it was the mention of friends, maybe it was the nibbling. "I want in on it. I can offer you a great deal, you know."

Maybe he could, at that. I ran my hands up over his shoulders and slid off his tux. There's something about the sight of a man in shirtsleeves and a gun holster that makes doing business a real pleasure. Unfortunately - or perhaps I should say fortunately - I saw something else as well, poking out of the inside pocket of his tuxedo. A fat silver pen. Now, maybe he'd brought it along because he thought he'd have occasion to write out a check for his aunt's birthday, or maybe he wanted to scribble down his phone number if he happened to meet a good tax advisor, but it looked to me a lot like an UNCLE communicator. And for all that I like to play with fire occasionally, I'm a risk-averse sort of girl at heart.

"Oh, really?" I breathed, reaching one hand behind his neck and pulling him down into a kiss. "Show me what you've got to offer."

5.

He can tell these guys aren't Thrush. Thrush would want an inventive death, a slow death, something that gives the dier time to ponder his own inferiority and the dyee a chance to gloat. It's all part of their Nietzschean, the strong-shall-inherit-the-earth, we-are-the-?bermensch philosophy. But as soon as Sasha de la Salle realised he was an UNCLE agent, she simply rammed a knife through his stomach and rolled him down the cellar steps, as if he was already a dead man.

Which, in a way, he is. What difference does a few minutes make? And yet, when Napoleon thinks about it, he can't really imagine being a corpse. He's seen them, of course, lots of them. Some of them even used to be people he knew. Some of them used to be people he cared about. But he could never relate the corpse to the person he'd known. Though he understood, intellectually, what separated the two - the act of dying - he found it completely unfathomable.

He knows now what dying's like. It's easy. The blood seeps from a hole in your gut and your legs won't move and even breathing hurts like fuck. All you have to do is lie there and let it happen.

It's freakily unlike the time Illya gave him a capsule that made him appear to be dead.

He's never been able to forgive Illya for that. Oh, not for giving him the capsule - after all, it saved his life, you'd have to be crazy not to appreciate that - but for making him want it. He hadn't known it was a trick. He'd thought he was being offered cyanide and he'd taken it eagerly. Gratefully, even. Worse than that, he'd begged for it. Illya had forced him to. Turning up the voltage, turning up the pain, until he'd known he was on the verge of cracking. He, Napoleon Solo, had looked into the face of a jack-booted psychopath, of everything he'd ever despised, and had begged for death. _Can't stand much more._ And the worst of it was, that Illya had seen it. Illya, who thought he was the world's biggest ham. Who had called his breakdown for Strothers "outrageously over the top". Who read the message "This isn't really me" in his every performance. Illya had looked into his eyes, and had seen that this time the message wasn't there.

He'd wanted to say afterwards "I was only pretending," but he couldn't bring himself to, because Illya would have known he was lying, though being Illya he would probably still have nodded politely and said "Of course." Napoleon can feel his cheeks burn at the thought of it. Not now; now there isn't enough pressure in his veins to carry the blood to his face; but in his memory. He doesn't need people to lie for him, to make excuses for him, least of all Illya. So he'd sucked it up, said nothing at all, told Waverly Illya had done an excellent job, and tried to avoid looking his friend in the eye. Tried, in truth, to avoid him altogether, him and the girl, even though she hadn't been the one to hear him beg. Only Illya, who never, ever mentions it, and whose very existence is a constant affront.

At least Illya isn't here now, he thinks. No-one is. There's no-one to see him whimper, no-one to see him beg. He can allow himself the luxury of giving way to terror and no-one will ever know. Can't stand much more.

And if he dies now with a grin on his face, giving death the finger one last time, no-one will ever know that either. So it won't be because of what other people will think of him. It will be for himself.

He is Napoleon Solo. He's dying, but he's dying on his terms.

6.

I was on my way back to the party when who should I bump into but Herman.

"What have you done with your boyfriend?" he said, in that faintly unpleasant tone that I was coming to realize was characteristic of him.

"He turned out not to be the man I thought he was," I said, sending him a look from under my lashes, "But don't get your hopes up, he's still more my type than you are."

If I'd been hoping he'd look crushed, I was to be disappointed. He merely gave a little shrug and said "At least let me escort you back to the dance floor." I rolled my eyes as unflatteringly as possible and resigned myself to to taking his proffered arm, only to find the barrel of a gun pressed against my neck.

"Where is he?" he said.

"What's it got to do with you?" I said, caught somewhat on the hop by this development.

"I have a professional interest in his welfare."

It wasn't until that moment that it dawned on me that I had been set up and that the fight had been staged for my benefit. You may well say I can't have been firing on all cylinders that night - I would have said it myself under any other circumstances - but the fact is that even a professional prizefighter would have thought those two were genuinely beating the crap out of each other. In fact, peering sideways at Herman, I could see that his upper lip was puffy and he appeared to be missing a tooth. Now tell me, with that kind of dedication to verisimilitude, how's a girl supposed to know when a guy's faking it?

"I have no gentlemanly scruples about killing you," said Herman, poking the gun into my neck painfully enough to give his words the ring of truth. I sighed.

"In the cellar. If you'd care to follow me?"

If I hadn't been firing on all cylinders before, my mind had shifted into top gear now, complete with fuel injection and turbo thrusts. In the last half hour I'd discovered not one but two UNCLE agents on the premises, and they were surely just the tip of the iceberg. We would have to cancel the big drop, forget the Redford connection, shift operations immediately. And in order to organize all this, I had to get away from Herman. Luckily I didn't anticipate any great difficulties, since he'd neglected to search me. Not that I can really blame him for the oversight, any more than I can blame myself for being fooled by that fight, because my dress was cut to make concealment the last thing on anyone's mind when they looked at me.

"Here we are," I said, stopping outside the cellar door. "Your friend's in there."

"Open it," he said.

"Well, duh! I haven't got a key," I said with an eye-roll. "Do you want me to call the guard to let us in, or what?"

"No, I'll manage," he said, fishing around in his pocket. He came up with a piece of what I guessed was plastic explosive, and then spent an awkward few seconds trying to insert it into the lock with one hand while keeping his gun trained on me with the other. I stuck out my hip and sneered and tried to look as unimpressed as possible, but I've got to say, he was pretty good at juggling the two activities. Still, no-one can keep their mind on two things at once for long, and when the explosives went off, he took his eyes off me. That was what I'd been waiting for, of course, and I kicked the gun clean out of his hand, then drew out my own pistol from inside my stocking. It's a very small pistol, ivory-handled and rather beautiful, and it's been overlooked by more dead men than I've had hot dinners. I planned to add Herman to the list as soon as he had stepped through the door, thereby relieving me of the need to shunt yet another corpse over the threshold.

"Open the door," I said, taking some satisfaction in jamming the pistol against the back of his neck with as much force as he'd used on me. "I'm sure it'll be a very touching reunion."

7.

Summoning up the will from somewhere, from the tips of his hair, from his toenails, from every last cell in his body, Napoleon pulls himself to his feet, one arm pressed against his stomach to stop his guts from falling out. His fingertips cling to the rough wall, hauling him up, defying gravity, defying impossibility, defying IT IS WRITTEN. The wall offers him a shoulder and he leans against it gratefully, struggling for breath.

"Look, wall," he whispers, "See that door? That doesn't look so tough. All I've got to do is get up there, get the lockpick out, and stop my hands shaking long enough to use it. Just watch me."

The door looks to be about a hundred feet up, but there can't really be that many steps. And he only has to take them one by one.

He's nearly at the top when he catches an odd little sound on the edge of his hearing, but he doesn't let it put him off. What matters is lifting his foot and putting it down, then lifting the other one and putting that down. He's lurching like a zombie, but it doesn't matter, all that matters are the careful slow steps, one, and then one, and then again one, and then again. He remembers Illya climbing the steps in Portugal after Mandor had worked him over, his movements clumsy, his concentration flagging. He feels like that now. It's so hard to focus, to keep in mind that all that matters is the next step. He wishes there was someone here to grab his wrist and pull him upwards, someone to tell him what to do, but he will manage. One more step. Focus. One more. One more. And then somehow, miraculously, he's at the top, and can lean his weight against the wall, and try to breathe. He'll have to lift his foot up to remove the lockpick, because if he sits down on the step it's a dead certainty that he will never get up again, but he's shaking so violently, he's not sure how to do it.

At that moment, in defiance of all probability, the door swings open. And there behind it is Illya, and behind him Sasha de la Salle, with something in her hand. Illya, instantly, ducks and Napoleon topples forward onto Sasha, knocking her to the floor. He's vaguely aware of Illya scrambling around behind him, but everything is going dark, and he has to hold on really tightly, because there's something he has to say to Illya, something hugely important. And then Illya is bending over him, his face huge and white with shock, and Napoleon manages to move his lips and force the words out.

"Not... bad... for a... dead man..."

He's certain the words will be all over HQ within the hour.

When Illya comes to see him in hospital he says "It would have been even more impressive if you really had been dead."

"Sorry," says Napoleon, trying very hard to hold back a grin, because really, _everything_ hurts. "I'll try to do better next time."


End file.
